Brown and Chertoff: the new American mediocrity.

After 9-11 it was clear that the Bush administration was being run by below average business school students. That is, people who got an MBA with the hopes of ass kissing their way into wealth and power without doing any work or having any discernible talent or skills .

Now, after this hurricane, we're seeing the same thing, but this time we're seeing it quite directly whenever Brown or Chertoff open their mouths. They are overmatched politically, intellectually, and managerially. They are mired in a bureaucratic mess that is designed to push paper rather than produce results, and they are the last kind of people that would have success in changing that. At almost all points last week they had less information on post-hurricane events than the average citizen watching Geraldo Rivera cry on TV while holding little black babies outside the Superdome on Fox News, when it was their job to be in control of one of the worst disasters in American history. Instead they were on TV trying to perform damage control in a universe they weren't familiar with.

Bureaucratic decay, indifference, and arrogance are nothing new, but this mediocre business school approach is. This administration has shown itself to be amateurish and has been exposed as fraudulent whenever it cannot shape the information surrounding an event, and in kind the media and ultimately the spin. That is, they are shown to be the B school PR hacks they are: 100% spin, 0% beef. And they're not even good at spinning.

Intellectually it's not hard to imagine that the press would grill the government on this in a manner I've never seen before. While the media largely tows the party line, preferring not to to scoop up the easy blood in the pool that lays at their feet, they will take it if it's handed to them in a gift wrapped box, as it was here in the form of photos of dead bodies in the streets, video of people suffering at the Superdome and poor folks in Mississippi who looked on at their ruined houses and lives while the remains were looted, and of course, when Chertoff attempted to bend reality when he said "we didn't have a plan for this new kind of catastrophe, the 'ultra catastrophe,'" when government documents available online show that they themselves called it one of the top three likely disaster scenarios facing this nation, exactly what all the billions in funding the DHS received were supposed to mitigate were such a disaster to occur.

BUT MAN, it sure was viscerally shocking to see the TV and newspapers full of pictures of dead bodies, and to watch Chertoff get taken out behind the shed for the woopin' of his life.

I don't know if Bush will be held accountable for any of this. Even with his historically low ratings he hasn't been taken to task for any of his previous blunders. He doesn't even engage in the time honored tradition of "throwing the low level bureaucrat under the bus" to "cleanse" the government after some disgrace to show the public that it's the person and not the institution that is the problem. I expect Brown and Chertoff to keep their jobs, with Bush heartily congratulating them both for a job well done.

I'm not sure how much responsibility has to be shared between NOLA mayor Nagin and LA governor Blanco. First off, even a best case response from local, state, and federal officials was still going to result in a terrible butcher's bill by the time the levees broke early last week (and I think it's going to be far, far worse than 9-11). I give Nagin credit for calling for the evacuation last Sunday. Should Nagin have had a plan to bus everyone out of the city that couldn't afford to escape on their own? Yeah I think so, but logistically I think that entails more than "local" resources. And really the political will for what would have last week been considered a radical act didn't exist. The taxpayers would have been pissed if 100k people were bussed out of town and the hurricane veered off to Florida.

It's going to be a while before we have a clear understanding of why the federal response took so long. A few things are starting to point to political sniping. First, the fact that FEMA was ordering groups ranging from Walmart, the Red Cross, and citizens with relief supplies to turn around upon reaching NO implies that it wasn't just a logistical issue of reaching NO. Then today I came across this article in the WaPo :

The [Bush] administration sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. Some officials in the state suspected a political motive behind the request. "Quite frankly, if they'd been able to pull off taking it away from the locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals," said the source, who does not have the authority to speak publicly.

Read the rest of it, the spin from both sides looks real bad.

I'm going to ask HR what they think about me doing volunteer work down there. I wish I had the guts to just leave, go down there, and work for the red cross, but I don't.

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